Introduction

Abstract

This volume brings together a number of chapters which I should happily describe as ‘inter-disciplinary’ if that term had not acquired — to my mind at least — certain negative or worrisome connotations. These have to do with the currently widespread idea that the boundaries between disciplines are so many artificial constructs of comparatively recent date whose chief function (so the argument goes) is to shore up standard academic divisions of labour. Such thinking derives from a wide range of sources, among them post-structuralism, postmodernism, cultural studies, the ‘strong’ programme in sociology of science, Kuhnian paradigm-relativism, the ‘linguistic turn’ (after late Wittgenstein) in various fields of thought, and Richard Rorty’s neopragmatist notion of ‘truth’ as just the compliment we pay to this or that currently favoured style of talk. It has also taken heart from developments in post-empiricist episte-mology which — following Quine — emphasise the ‘underdetermination’ of theory by evidence and the ‘theory-laden’ character of observation-statements. In Chapter 6 I discuss the way that analytic philosophy has tended very often to swing back and forth between a ‘normal’, constructive or problem-solving discourse and a whole range of (by its own lights) untypically extreme reactive proposals. If this account suggests an analogy with Kuhn on the cyclic alternation of ‘normal’ and ‘revolutionary’ periods in the history of science then it does so more with a view to locating the sources of such chronic instability within the analytic enterprise.KeywordsPerceptual ResponseMusical PerceptionConstructive EmpiricistLinguistic TurnSceptical ParadoxThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.